The 20 Best Electronic Albums of 2016

There were no real tectonic shifts in electronic music in 2016; even the most skilled artists’ efforts went largely toward improving upon—or at least making their mark upon—long-established forms. Perhaps that’s why our year-end ranking is so full of veteran players, like Aphex Twin, who continued his post-comeback streak to put a new spin on slow-motion techno, and Larry Heard, who returned to his Mr. Fingers alias for the first time in more than a decade. (Speaking of comebacks, none was more unexpected than the Avalanches’ long-awaited return from the wilderness—but like some kind of sample-flipping Rip van Winkles, they managed to make Since I Left You seem like only yesterday.) While diverse takes on traditionalist house and techno set the tone for much of the year’s output, from Leon Vynehall’s deep-diving Rojus to Marie Davidson’s brittle, chilly Adieux Au Dancefloor, even more classic strains of funk bubbled up in the work of Mndsgn, Nite-Funk, and Moodymann, who dedicated his DJ-Kicks mix to a wide-ranging array of reconstructed soul. That’s not to say that there was nothing new under the sun, however: Autechre continued to bang out algorithmic jams that extraterrestrial beings may one day use as a kind of sonic Rosetta Stone to figure out exactly what made humans tick.

Cheetah

His formerly hermetic tendencies now firmly a thing of the past, Richard D. James continues his hot streak, dusting off two woozy, low-slung tracks from his famous SoundCloud dump and assembling an entire EP around them. Building the release around the sounds of the Cheetah MS800—described by one enthusiast as “one of the most unfathomable instruments ever made”—James makes the most of the obscure digital synthesizer’s mutable wavetable technology, slowing the tempo, stripping down the beats, and zeroing in on gelatinous timbres. The slow tempos and straight-ahead tones make for what, at first, seems like one of his most uncomplicated releases in ages—but direct your attention just right, and, as with a “Magic Eye” image, a world of detail comes snapping into focus.

elseq 1-5

Autechre’s live shows, performed in near-total darkness, can be overwhelming experiences. And in recent years, so are the duo’s releases: Their ongoing series of live recordings is nine installments deep and growing, while this digital-only album sprawls across five virtual “discs” and more than four hours. Even if you don’t pony up the cash for the 24-bit lossless version and content yourself with a damn-near Paleolithic 320 kbps, Sean Booth and Rob Brown’s algorithmic free-for-alls have never sounded more vivid, flitting between cellophane crinkle and ice-crystal fractals, and flecked with stray bits of hip-hop and Stockhausen. If you own a quality pair of headphones or speakers, however, the hi-fi version really is the way to go: Staring down the tunnel of a track like “TBM2” or the gorgeous “pendulu hv moda,” the level of detail is so granular, it can practically inspire vertigo. And even if “cozy” isn't quite the right word for it, there is something soothing about Autechre’s music once you let their silvery space-blanket textures envelop you.

Wildflower

Over the past few years, a number of stragglers—My Bloody Valentine, Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, Daft Punk—have finally come in from the cold. The Avalanches, on the other hand, had promised their imminent return so many times that there was little reason they’d ever abandon surfing, or dingo hunting, or whatever antipodean pleasure that was standing between them and their sophomore album. By June, though, that last sample-clearance form must have finally gotten faxed back to them, paving the way for the giddy “Frankie Sinatra” and, after 16 long years, Wildflower. Just like their debut, it's a densely packed collage of disco, soul, and folk that glistens like dewdrops on dandelion tufts; this time, though, Danny Brown, Biz Markie, and members of Mercury Rev, Toro Y Moi, Silver Jews, Royal Trux, and Camp Lo are on hand to inject their soft-focus fantasia with an added element of humanity.

Adieux Au Dancefloor

For an album whose title translates as “Farewell to the Dancefloor,” Marie Davidson’s Cititrax debut pulls no punches: Pairing chilly coldwave synths and even chillier spoken-word vocals with tough drum programming, the Montreal electronic musician offers nine tracks aimed squarely at the small hours in cavernous warehouses. There’s nothing conventional about the way she uses her machines, though. On “Inferno” and “Denial,” she sculpts pummeling repetition into wide, psychedelic arcs, and on bare-bones cuts like “Good Times,” she strips acid house down to its leering, Cheshire Cat grin. “You call me naïve?” she asks, unapologetic, in another spring-loaded track. “I’ll tell you what: I’m naïve to the bone.”

Two Changes

Where their 2015 album Studies I-XVII for Samplers and Percussion strung together 17 short, minimalist sketches for marimba, xylophone, and other small, percussive sounds, Beatrice Dillon and Rupert Clervaux’s Two Changes takes the opposite tack, with two long, evolving explorations of shifting rhythms and garbled frequencies. “The Same River Twice” offers nearly 19 minutes of rippling techno pulses overlaid with free-jazz trumpet, scraped piano strings, and birdsong, while “A Different River Once” uses vibraphone improv and modular squiggles to suggest dynamic phenomena in microscopic detail, like a molecular view of snowmelt.

Open Your Eyes

On his first album for Teklife, DJ Earl proposes a vision of footwork that's both bumblebee nimble and heavy as a Mack truck. What makes Open Your Eyesso thrilling isn’t just the 808 programming, though his devilishly syncopated rhythms snap with the precision of very expensive robotics; it's the richly colored, keenly textured synths and samples that fill every corner of this deliriously detailed album. In “Rachett,” we get silvery Rhodes and petulant mosquitos; “Let’s Work” gives us disco strings and hyperreal soprano sax. Some of that ultra-vivid sheen probably comes down to Oneohtrix Point Never, who contributes to three tracks. But the rough-and-ready sonics of two tunes featuring DJ Manny and DJ Taye are no less gripping—particularly “Fukk It Up,” which sounds like a turntablist going to town on dub techno pioneers Basic Channel.

Sirens

Described by Jaar as a companion piece to Pomegranates and Nymphs, Sirens bundles together all of the Chilean-American musician's interests and talents—slinky house beats, atmospheric collage, and midnight-hued pop—into an expansive, shape-shifting beast. Moving from ambient to song-form and back again, Jaar channels Bauhaus side project Tones on Tail into elegiac jazz piano, filters ’50s rock’n’roll into Gregorian chant, and layers squealing bass clarinets over overdriven drums. Collapsing the personal into the world-historical, he offers a dark, deeply nuanced record that feels especially apt for the present moment. “Chapter one: We fucked up,” he sings on the closing “History Lesson,” counting his way up through the mounting catastrophes, picking his way through the ethical wreckage. The final lesson—“Chapter six: We’re done”—is a wearily familiar one these days.

After Hours

From the police scanner on the trap track that opens the album to the title “Sawgrass Expressway”—a reference to Broward County’s State Road 869—Jubilee’s debut album couldn’t get much more Floridian if it featured an octopus floating in a parking garage. The Miami-raised, NYC-based producer goes in hard on the whipcrack syncopations of classic Miami bass, but she doesn't stop there. “Wine Up,” featuring the Bronx singer Hoodcelebrityy, is a tough, bass-heavy dancehall tune in which the dissonance between vocals and backing track throws off sparks, while “Beach Ball” projects contemporary bass music through the lens of classic Detroit techno.

The Bells

Kornél Kovács is a cofounder, with Axel Boman and Petter Nordkvist, of Stockholm’s Studio Barnhus label. On his debut album, he smoothes the imprint’s sometimes oddball, sometimes impish style of dance music into a relatively streamlined set of crisp, percussive house tracks. “Relatively” being the keyword here: For all the bittersweet detachment of cuts like “BB” and “Szív Utca,” he can’t quite resist giving free rein to more manic moods on “Gex,” a disco-fueled tune that's primed for conga lines.

Body Wash

For an album called Body Wash, Ringgo Ancheta’s slinky second album for Stones Throw feels a lot more like a full-mind rubdown. Taking a page from Dâm-Funk’s SoCal electro-funk squelch—LinnDrum thwacks, legato synth leads—he leans hard on the harmonies, tipping the balance toward the cosmic jazz accents of Flying Lotus and Kendrick Lamar. The blissed-out vocals, meanwhile, amount to subliminal self-actualization messages designed to steer the listener “from where ya at to where ya going” as frictionlessly as possible. Sun-baked, wind-kissed, and West Coast to the extreme, it’s new age for a new era.